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News About Tech, Money and InnovationFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:31:25 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.178053529Copyright 2016, VentureBeatVentureBeathttp://vbstatic.co/brand/img/logos/VB_Extended_Logo_40H.pnghttp://venturebeat.com
25040Venturebeat.comHeal raises $27 million for its doctor-on-demand house call servicehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/18/heal-raises-27-million-for-its-doctor-on-demand-house-call-service/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/18/heal-raises-27-million-for-its-doctor-on-demand-house-call-service/#respondTue, 18 Oct 2016 11:00:59 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2081825When Heal was founded in 2014, its goal was similar to that of many on-demand healthcare services, but with one difference: Instead of relying on video technology, Heal would bring back the house call. This has apparently intrigued investors, and the company announced today that it has raised a $26.9 million Series A round of […]
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When Heal was founded in 2014, its goal was similar to that of many on-demand healthcare services, but with one difference: Instead of relying on video technology, Heal would bring back the house call. This has apparently intrigued investors, and the company announced today that it has raised a $26.9 million Series A round of funding. The latest infusion of capital was led by the Tull Investment Group.

Other participants include Breyer Capital, Qualcomm executive chairman Paul Jaobs, and Skydance Media chief executive David Ellison, along with early investors Hashtag One and Slow Ventures.

Heal said that the new investment will be used to grow the company and improve its back-end technology, while some funds will be allocated to marketing. Heal currently operates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County, Silicon Valley, and San Diego, with more than 10,000 patients signed up. It also participates in medical networks like Blue Shield of California, Anthem Blue Cross of California, Cigna Healthcare, Aetna, and United Healthcare.

The impetus for the company came when Dr. Renee Dua’s son became sick and wasn’t able to see a doctor when he visited the emergency room. The family waited for hours, only to be told to go home “because it wasn’t that serious.” Dua felt that patients deserve to have a better way to see a doctor without waiting for hours or spending an entire day away from work. Heal was born to provide in-person doctors on demand.

“Sixty percent of Americans want a doctor who will make house calls,” the company told VentureBeat. “The healthcare system is broken — and no one is happy. Patients aren’t getting needed access to quality primary care, doctors aren’t practicing the quality medical care they’ve been trained to, hospitals aren’t living by measures consistent with what’s best for the patient, and $40 billion is spent annually on the overuse of U.S. emergency rooms.”

Although insurance covers Heal usage, the service charges $99 for those who aren’t in-network. Simply request a physician between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. when you’re sick or need a physical for yourself or a loved one. A qualified doctor, be it a physician, pediatrician, or psychologist, will come to your house when it’s convenient for you — all within an hour of being requested.

The marketplace is certainly filled with many of these Uber-like healthcare provider apps, such as Doctor on Demand (though it’s limited to video chats), Doctors Making Housecalls, Pager, Medicast, Go2Nurse, Curbside Care, and many others.

To date, Heal has raised more than $40 million in venture capital.

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]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/18/heal-raises-27-million-for-its-doctor-on-demand-house-call-service/feed/02081825Heal raises $27 million for its doctor-on-demand house call serviceTheranos CEO says company working to fix product and lab problemshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/08/01/theranos-ceo-says-company-working-to-fix-product-and-lab-problems/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/01/theranos-ceo-says-company-working-to-fix-product-and-lab-problems/#respondMon, 01 Aug 2016 22:42:44 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2019508(Reuters) — The chief executive of embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc on Monday said the privately held firm is working diligently to rectify all of its outstanding issues involving its product and laboratory operations. Speaking before some 1,000 scientists at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry meeting in Philadelphia, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes described new […]
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(Reuters) — The chief executive of embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc on Monday said the privately held firm is working diligently to rectify all of its outstanding issues involving its product and laboratory operations.

Speaking before some 1,000 scientists at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry meeting in Philadelphia, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes described new products that she said are “distinct from the operations of our clinical laboratories” that have come under scrutiny.

Prior to introducing Holmes, association president Patricia Jones said the organization does not endorse Theranos. “We’re all aware that there have been some suggestions about whether we’ll see some science today and the viability of Theranos technology,” Jones said.

The company, once valued at $9 billion, was founded by Holmes in 2003 to develop an innovative blood testing device that would give quicker results using just one drop of blood.

It ran into trouble after the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles beginning last October suggesting the devices were flawed and inaccurate.

Holmes last month was barred by U.S. regulators from owning or operating a lab for at least two years and, in a crushing blow, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services revoked a key certificate for its California lab and terminated the facility’s approval to receive government payments.

Walgreens Boots Alliance terminated its relationship with the company in June and closed operations at all 40 Theranos Wellness Centers at its drug stores in Arizona.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/01/theranos-ceo-says-company-working-to-fix-product-and-lab-problems/feed/02019508Theranos CEO says company working to fix product and lab problemsHow the most connected hospitals will use chatbotshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/07/28/how-the-most-connected-hospitals-will-use-chatbots/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/28/how-the-most-connected-hospitals-will-use-chatbots/#respondThu, 28 Jul 2016 19:10:51 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2015873GUEST: Sure, chatbots are useful for service industries like hospitality and food delivery, but in health care? Some groups are testing the use of chatbots to retrieve medical information from within a messaging app. At first glance, that seems a bit impersonal, but a closer look reveals a wide range of use cases where bots could make your next […]
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GUEST:

Sure, chatbots are useful for service industries like hospitality and food delivery, but in health care? Some groups are testing the use of chatbots to retrieve medical information from within a messaging app. At first glance, that seems a bit impersonal, but a closer look reveals a wide range of use cases where bots could make your next visit to the hospital, doctor’s office, or pharmacy faster and more effective.

Let’s run this back a bit. If you’re not familiar with bots, here’s a brief explanation. Bots are software applications that run automated tasks or scripts that serve as shortcuts for completing a certain job, but they do it faster (a lot faster) and with verve. And in health care, we spend a lot of time spent generating and retrieving information.

By putting a trained army of bots inside an application — smartphone, desktop, whatever-top — health care workers can rapidly improve throughput by simply cutting out a bunch of steps. That’s something most care providers today would welcome, especially with millions of new people entering the system as a result of the Affordable Care Act and the aging of baby boomers. With the crush of increased data entry and new regulations, costs and rote work are skyrocketing.

Bedside bots

In the current age of Obamacare, patient information must be captured electronically, which means physicians, nurses, techs, and others better have good typing skills and a chunk of time each shift to devote to entering patient information. While these regulations have done wonders to move health care out of the paper age, they also have relegated clinicians to the role of highly paid part-time data entry clerks. The good news — and there is plenty of good news — is that technology companies are finding clever ways to make this newly digitized information accessible and actionable through messaging apps.

It turns out that the same technology that lets you order a pizza with a simple emoji can also be used by physicians and nurses to retrieve lab results, scan a patient’s ID bracelet, or find the on-call cardiologist. While still early in the development and adoption cycle, these smart messaging apps could help transform health care by automating routine tasks on a mass scale, so information becomes accessible not only at a computer at the nurses’ station but also on the smartphone of the physician or nurse at your bedside.

Here are a few more clever ways that bot-loving hospitals are using this technology:

Querying a patient’s ID to check their insurance and confirm coverage parameters

Accessing information instantly about drug interactions and side effects

Engaging with discharged patients to follow up on treatment plans and adherence

Scanning bar codes when inventorying medical supplies

Johnny on the bot

Health care bots aren’t just for medical staff in hospitals, however.

They’ve now got their robotic tentacles in other areas, too, including the patient portals that millions of people use every month online. Through a simple chat window, bots can do mundane tasks such as gathering insurance information before bringing on a live human support rep, booking doctor appointments, processing invoices, sending reminders to take medication, and renewing prescriptions.

They can provide educational materials for patients with certain conditions and present patients with a list of common side effects and drug interactions for a newly prescribed medication — all with a cheerful tone and some really fast typing.

One huge pain point that most Americans encounter sooner or later is ridiculously long hold times when you have a seemingly simple question. In fact, health support hotlines consistently exceed 30-minute hold times per call. Countless hours are wasted every day by patients who simply want to schedule a consult or get a fast answer to a health concern.

By leveraging bots, providers can significantly decrease those frustrating wait times and quickly determine if a patient needs escalation to a nurse, physician, emergency room, or specialty practice.

In the same vein, billing and payment bots can transform the way individuals manage billing questions. Rather than requiring patients to sit on hold to speak directly with a full-time staffer or to use a clunky, ill-equipped billing hotline, bots can instantly answer questions about services billed and outstanding balances. You can begin to see that bots are a simple solution to deliver an overall better experience for patients while expediting payments for providers and curbing an organization’s costs.

The bottom line

Bots today work best for simple tasks, but the day is coming when health care will rely more and more on this type of automation to complete increasingly complex tasks. As the technology advances and we as patients become more comfortable interacting with computer programs, we should see the cost of health care go down, the quality of health care services go up, and the happiness of health care workers improve.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/28/how-the-most-connected-hospitals-will-use-chatbots/feed/02015873How the most connected hospitals will use chatbotsWas the US health industry under a concerted attack, and we missed it in the noise?http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/02/was-the-us-health-industry-under-a-concerted-attack-and-we-missed-it-in-the-noise/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/02/was-the-us-health-industry-under-a-concerted-attack-and-we-missed-it-in-the-noise/#respondSat, 02 Jul 2016 20:15:33 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1994189GUEST: News first hit media outlets on Monday, June 27, 2016 that a U.S. healthcare database had been breached and half a million patient records had been stolen and posted for sale on the Dark Web. Later reports suggested even more records had been stolen when the hacker advertised another 9.3 million files of patient information […]
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GUEST:

News first hit media outlets on Monday, June 27, 2016 that a U.S. healthcare database had been breached and half a million patient records had been stolen and posted for sale on the Dark Web. Later reports suggested even more records had been stolen when the hacker advertised another 9.3 million files of patient information – bringing the total to a staggering 10 million personal health records of American citizens for sale from multiple organizations in the health industry.

A team at our company, Cymmetria, was one of the groups that uncovered the extent of this incident. The media’s information was incomplete at first, and when we saw the alleged hacker continuing to post on the Dark Web, we saw that there were actually three different sales posted. Among the organizations supposedly affected were healthcare providers from New York, Missouri, and Oklahoma, in addition to a large nationwide health insurer.

The hacker has kept the names of the affected organizations anonymous, auctioning off their private data to the highest bidder.

The hacker, who refers to himself as “thedarkoverlord,” claimed that the attack succeeded due to use of a 0-day vulnerability in the healthcare organizations’ remote desktop services, bypassing the controls put in place to prevent malicious users from gaining remote access to systems. But is this claim an attempt to draw our attention away from how the hacker actually got in?

Such a vulnerability would only enable access, and for the attacker to successfully steal this much data, gaining access to the network would not be enough. The accepted tradecraft for moving about the network and gaining access to more systems, as is very likely to have been the case here, is lateral movement, or “pivoting.” The attacker uses information on a system to figure out where to go next using the credentials of a real user, so as not to cause an anomaly that can be detected by defensive measures.

After bypassing preventative security measures such as sandboxing, hackers reach endpoints and bypass endpoint security solutions. They can then proceed to pivot and perform lateral movement within the network as described above, allowing them to obtain much more information. This is obviously problematic and requires new types of controls to be used, such as cyber deception.

Such an attack has many implications.

On a personal level, 10 million Americans now face the fact that their personally identifiable information along with their private health records are out in the world and can potentially be used for anything from impersonation to blackmail. Although it’s fair to note that, with so many data breaches occurring, criminals have quite a lot of data to work with already.

On a national level, while the healthcare industry has certainly been targeted before, it means that an industry-wide attack has likely been conducted against the United States of America, and it has gone under the radar as “yet another data breach.” It seems that with so many cyber attacks happening daily, and the damage being digital, it’s often easy to miss the obvious.

We need to take stock of three facts: Intelligence is complex in the cyber realm and needs to be conducted carefully. One can never be sure with online claims, even on this magnitude. If this breach indeed proves true, over 10 million Americans’ health records are now effectively public record. The United States is under attack and needs to acknowledge it.

It is easy to miss a strategic attack when it is surrounded daily by millions of other similar incidents. People talk about the possibility that we will see a cyber 9/11, or a digital Pearl Harbor. This incident may not look as dramatic, but it warrants our full attention.

Laura Ferguson is a Senior Analyst at Cymmetria.

Shayell Aaron is a Senior Analyst at Cymmetria.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/02/was-the-us-health-industry-under-a-concerted-attack-and-we-missed-it-in-the-noise/feed/01994189Was the US health industry under a concerted attack, and we missed it in the noise?\n Gusto adds health benefits to its small business payroll helperhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/05/24/gusto-adds-health-benefits-to-its-small-business-payroll-helper/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/24/gusto-adds-health-benefits-to-its-small-business-payroll-helper/#respondTue, 24 May 2016 18:00:13 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1960080Gusto wants to help business owners better manage their employee needs, so it’s extending beyond payroll into health benefits. The company today introduced a service that simplifies the way human resource managers and benefit administrators select insurance plans and coverage to offer employees. Formerly ZenPayroll, the company has a mission to solve problems business owners face, starting […]
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Formerly ZenPayroll, the company has a mission to solve problems business owners face, starting off with payroll. However, the company told VentureBeat that it always had aspirations beyond that, and so it has set its sights on health care and related benefits. Lauren Fifield, a benefits operations manager at Gusto, said that “insurance for employees was emotional, deeply important, and an expensive problem for business owners everywhere.” This led to the company opting to use its technology and service to solve this.

Right now, Gusto is focusing on life insurance, disability, medical, dental, and vision coverage, and the health benefit service will be available in the eight states in which it operates: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Texas. Its payroll offering is available in all 50 states.

In early research, business owners told Gusto that figuring out benefits was hard. “‘I love my team and I don’t want them to be stressed. I want them to be healthy and come to work happy,'” Fifield said a customer told her, with many comparing choosing health plans as a combination of “what was hated and this thing they thought they had to do.”

We’ve all had to review benefits every year at our job, selecting among several options. The process is even more complex for your company’s benefits administrator, who has to parse through dozens of pages, facts, plans, and more — it can be a daunting experience. “Business owners have to triangulate between the law, the needs of the employees, and navigating their own needs as a consumer of insurance and business owner,” Fifield explained.

To reduce the stress, Gusto’s platform expedites the process by offering you the best choices based on your employees and company information and helping you select benefits in a faster manner. Traditionally, brokers have provided insurance information in the form of an online PDF, making it difficult to search for specific information — naturally, business owners don’t find that helpful. That’s why Gusto not only stores the information online, but employs an algorithm that uses input from its engineering team and advice from brokers to provide customized information for its customers.

You can only sign up for the health benefits service if you’re already enrolled in Gusto’s payroll offering, but there’s no additional fee to use it. Product manager Eric Schuchman said that having these two systems together simplifies things into a single interface for administrators to manage.

Through this integration, Gusto will leverage a company’s payroll data to craft plan recommendations. Its algorithm will examine the firm’s size, location, budget, industry, and competitors to find what best fits the company’s budget. “Because we’re at the start a payroll business, we have the information about the business and team, such as salaries, where it’s located, how fast it’s growing, etc. We can create a macrosense of where the business is, the employer, and what’s good for them,” Fifield said.

The plans that get highlighted are ones Gusto thinks are the best for the business owners, but if the client company wants one that wasn’t featured, administrators can provide that information to Gusto for inclusion within a few days. The algorithm is always learning, constantly evolving to be more accurate.

When using Gusto, benefit administrators are presented with an analysis of their company and a recommendation on plans that fit their price-per-employee needs. The idea is to provide a simple personalized broker touch that will hold your hand as you go through the process, assuring them that they’re being taken care of. Benefit administrators can select a tier that fits their company’s budget and establish the contribution level. Discount or premium plans can also be chosen to offer employees. Gusto ranks plans using its customized score that considers not only price quotes, but the quality of the carrier and cost of the service.

If an employee leaves the company, someone in human resources needs only to remove them from payroll to automatically take them off the health benefits side.

Schuchman told VentureBeat that any company can easily move their benefits and policies over to Gusto. In fact, while the service is being unveiled today, health benefits has been around for a few months — 60 percent of Gusto’s customers switched over from a legacy broker. “The majority of folks have an error that occurred before they come to Gusto. That’s because it’s a manual process and it’s prone to errors,” Schuchman explained.

This health benefit offering competes not only against Zenefits and SimplyInsured, but also TriNet, JustWorks, and even traditional insurance brokers that come to your office armed with printouts. Gusto said its offering is optimized for the mobile web and desktop, and is HIPAA compliant.

The company currently counts more than 30,000 businesses registered on its platform.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/24/gusto-adds-health-benefits-to-its-small-business-payroll-helper/feed/01960080Gusto adds health benefits to its small business payroll helperWatsi raises $3.5M philanthropic growth round to help it treat 1M patients by 2020http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/04/watsi-raises-3-5m-philanthropic-growth-round-to-help-it-treat-1m-patients-by-2020/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/04/watsi-raises-3-5m-philanthropic-growth-round-to-help-it-treat-1m-patients-by-2020/#respondWed, 04 Nov 2015 17:00:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1833439Silicon Valley nonprofit Watsi announced today that it has raised a $3.5 million philanthropic growth round designed to fund its administrative functions. This is the second round of funds the organization has made and will likely help it to keep going for the next two to three years as it pursues a mission of providing people […]
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Silicon Valley nonprofit Watsi announced today that it has raised a $3.5 million philanthropic growth round designed to fund its administrative functions. This is the second round of funds the organization has made and will likely help it to keep going for the next two to three years as it pursues a mission of providing people much-needed medical operations.

This new investment also signals the start of a new chapter for Watsi as it looks to scale. Chase Adam, the firm’s chief executive, has made a bold proclamation of its goal, reaching 1 million patients by 2020 — certainly not an easy task, since Watsi revealed it helped 5,000 people in the past two years. There is a plan to jumpstart this, however, and Adam told VentureBeat that it rests on two things: Watsi better marketing itself, and implementing an institutional model to get governments, health care companies, and others to donate.

At its foundation, this Y Combinator graduate is a crowdfunding platform enabling anyone to directly fund potentially life-changing health care for people around the world. More than 14,200 people have donated through Watsi’s website to date, but when you factor in contributions coming from its Tencent partnership, Adam estimates that it’s close to 100,000 donors. The average one-time donation made by a user is $40, but for recurring donations, it’s $32.

The service now supports patients in over 20 countries, including Cambodia, Kenya, Tanzania, Guatemala, and Nepal. It has also expanded its care offering, funding more than 170 different procedures, including heart surgery, cancer care, and brain tumor removals.

Watsi’s next step is to move beyond individual donations and tap into open-sourcing structured health care data to improve efficiency and effectiveness of institutions. The organization has received grants to fund a malnutrition clinical trial at a hospital in Guatemala, with the goal of taking the data and giving it to other nonprofits to leverage in improving health care for all. What the trial examines are two groups: one that receives treatment for malnutrition, and another that also receives education on how to overcome malnutrition.

Adam wants to change the way health care providers and institutions view data that’s collected. Instead of just identifying the patients, such as what procedure they need, he suggests using the data to tell a story. What Watsi hopes to extract are details about why an operation costs what it does; understand what’s happening on day 1, 5, and 10; and the degrees and quality of success. All of this is to hold hospitals more accountable and give more information to supported organizations about where best to take patients for operations and care.

The $3.5 million round of funding was led by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham (who also sits on Watsi’s board), Tencent, The Pershing Square Foundation, Ron Conway, Vinod Khosla, Jasmine Social Investments, The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, and other individual investors.

Adam thinks that there’s plenty of opportunity for Watsi to grow and hit its milestone of 1 million patients helped within the next 4-plus years. According to the World Health Organization, up to 40 percent of the $7 trillion needed to fund health care is lost due to inefficiency. Watsi believes that potential donors may be growing tired of their money not necessarily getting to the right people or cause. Because it’s a technology firm, Watsi makes it easier for patients and supporting organizations to get the money more quickly — no middleman is involved.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/04/watsi-raises-3-5m-philanthropic-growth-round-to-help-it-treat-1m-patients-by-2020/feed/01833439Watsi raises $3.5M philanthropic growth round to help it treat 1M patients by 2020Glow launches Ruby, an iOS app to help women better manage their health and sex liveshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/07/30/glow-launches-ruby-an-ios-app-to-help-women-better-manage-their-health-and-sex-lives/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/30/glow-launches-ruby-an-ios-app-to-help-women-better-manage-their-health-and-sex-lives/#respondThu, 30 Jul 2015 14:00:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1776787Two years ago, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin launched a new company called Glow, whose sole mission was improving healthcare, particularly in the area of women’s fertility. Having been “extremely happy” with the results of its initial efforts, Glow is now expanding to become a resource for women looking to manage their overall sexual health. Called Ruby, […]
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Two years ago, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin launched a new company called Glow, whose sole mission was improving healthcare, particularly in the area of women’s fertility. Having been “extremely happy” with the results of its initial efforts, Glow is now expanding to become a resource for women looking to manage their overall sexual health.

Called Ruby, the new application is geared towards women who are not looking to get pregnant, but still want a tool to better manage their health and sex lives. According to Jennifer Tye, Glow’s vice president of marketing and partnerships, half of Glow’s users are not trying to conceive, but have joined the fertility-focused app for lack of a suitable alternative.

The new application is part health tracker and part social network. Women can input data into Ruby’s Anytime Log –from their current emotional state to physical symptoms, health-related incidents, or other concerns (e.g. Did you have unprotected six? Do you have cramps? Are you stressed?). Data from Apple’s Health App is also entered into the app and analyzed. Ruby’s data science then helps women recognize patterns across their cycles.

Ruby is also interesting from a design standpoint, as it leverages the design potential of Apple’s iOS platform. There is an interactive monthly view which you can rotate on the screen for a historical recap of your symptoms or concerns. Tye says the app was designed to be “fun, quick, and simple, yet covers the key aspects of your health.”

Besides tracking your data, Ruby also features a community where women can ask questions and share information with other users. Glow has partnered with Bedsider.org, an online birth control support network operated by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, to offer expert information and resources should women need it. The hope is that women who are having difficulty getting answers to health and sex-related questions may find it helpful to connect with someone in Ruby who is dealing with the same issues. Tye tells VentureBeat that all the advice is presented in a sex-positive way to avoid discouraging women from asking questions. Simply put: there’s no shaming here.

Anyone can create communities within Ruby, but existing forums range across a broad spectrum. Tye explains that there are groups addressing serious topics such as sexual assault, abortion, and unexpected pregnancy, as well as space devoted to lighter queries. Women “need to have a safe environment where they will share and can seek help,” says Tye.

Although you can use Ruby without creating a Glow account, if you opt to establish credentials, your data can be synced between the platform’s apps, including Glow and Glow Nurture, an app focused on the needs of pregnant women. This means that if you’ve become pregnant with Glow but now want to use services from Ruby, you won’t have to start from scratch — all the data can be easily shared.

With all of Glow’s applications, Tye says privacy is taken very seriously and there are members of the company whose role is to ensure the community remains “a vibrant place and safe one.”

As part of Ruby’s launch, Glow has partnered with Huru International, a nonprofit providing menstrual hygiene supplies and sex education to young women in developing countries. Tye shared that women in these communities who lack access to feminine products must often miss school and work during their period. To counter this, Glow will “give a young women a day back” by donating a day’s supply of Huru products for every mention of Ruby on social media using the hashtag #TalkRubyToMe.

With $23 million in funding (of which $17 million was raised in October 2014*), Glow believes it can make an impact on women’s lives. Already more than 50,000 women have become pregnant while using its apps, according to Tye. And now Glow is hoping to contribute to another area of women’s healthcare. But while the resource could certainly benefit women, the question remains whether its users will take advantage of the app. Will Ruby be any different from health trackers that people purchase but frequently fail to update? Forming habits of regular usage will be particularly important with an app such as this, which depends on user input.

Ruby is available in the Apple App Store with an Android version likely coming in the future.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/30/glow-launches-ruby-an-ios-app-to-help-women-better-manage-their-health-and-sex-lives/feed/01776787Glow launches Ruby, an iOS app to help women better manage their health and sex livesData suggests we should be more worried about medical breacheshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/data-suggests-we-should-be-more-worried-about-medical-breaches/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/data-suggests-we-should-be-more-worried-about-medical-breaches/#respondTue, 06 Jan 2015 04:03:31 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1636053No doubt hacker attacks on retailers are scary, but medical breaches might just be scarier.
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In 2014 medical institutions and healthcare providers made up nearly a third of all data breaches, according to records from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

While attacks on financial services are slightly more prevalent, consumers should be much more concerned with getting their medical insurance or health records ripped off.

In the first place, banks tend to cover consumers in instances of fraud. Someone nabs your Visa card number and uses it to buy a round-trip ticket to Kazakhstan, and you’ll easily get those charges reversed — plus the bank will issue you a new card. But even in the worst case scenario, your personal well being isn’t threatened.

Not so with medical fraud.

As the Medical Identity Fraud alliance points out in its report on medical fraud, the patient often doesn’t find out their identity has been stolen until they notice a discrepancy in their own records. For instance, a man goes into to a hospital to get treated for a back injury. Upon being X-rayed the doctor also notices that the man has a swollen lymph node, for which he prescribes penicillin. The man says he’s allergic to penicillin. The doctor asks, then why did you come into this hospital a week ago for penicillin? The man says, I didn’t come into the hospital a week ago for penicillin … you get the drift.

Now imagine that same scenario except the patient is unconscious and his/her record has been altered to remove the reference to his penicillin allergy. Now we’re talking about a scenario where the patient’s life is potentially in danger.

In addition, it can be really hard to prove that you didn’t receive the medical services indicated on your record, which can also lead to costly insurance charges.

Hot medical identities can sell for as little as $50 (.pdf), according to a report issued earlier this year by the FBI. With more and more hospitals moving to electronic health records and healthcare breaches on the rise, its hard to see how this problem won’t become more widespread in the coming year.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/data-suggests-we-should-be-more-worried-about-medical-breaches/feed/01636053Data suggests we should be more worried about medical breachesBill Gates is building a machine to diagnose nasty diseaseshttp://venturebeat.com/2014/10/09/bill-gates-is-building-a-machine-to-diagnose-nasty-diseases/
Fri, 10 Oct 2014 04:00:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?post_type=vb_syndicated&p=1573440"Can you create a new device that quickly diagnoses HIV, TB, malaria, and other diseases… accepts different samples, like blood, saliva, and sputum… is affordable… and reliable… and will work in a small clinic that has only a few hours of electricity a day?" Gates asks.
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is celebrating 10 years of its Grand Challenges in Global Health program, where it asks scientists to brainstorm solutions to gnarly health problems and then offers grants to the best ideas.

On Thursday, he gave an update on a new challenge: “Can you create a new device that quickly diagnoses HIV, TB, malaria, and other diseases… accepts different samples, like blood, saliva, and sputum… is affordable… and reliable… and will work in a small clinic that has only a few hours of electricity a day?” he wrote in a blog post.

]]>1573440Bill Gates is building a machine to diagnose nasty diseasesAcupera pulls in $4M to help health providers better understand their patientshttp://venturebeat.com/2014/08/12/acupera-pulls-in-4m-to-help-health-providers-better-understand-their-patients/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/12/acupera-pulls-in-4m-to-help-health-providers-better-understand-their-patients/#respondWed, 13 Aug 2014 04:19:51 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1526020Acupera's system mines data from electronic health records, medical claims, and lab results to help doctors and nurses better care for their patients.
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Health tech provider Acupera today announced it has raised $4 million in new financing.

Acupera’s system mines data from electronic health records, medical claims, and lab results to provide clinical information to doctors and nurses so that they can provide appropriate care to patients based on their individual needs.

“Acupera offers population health technology that fits seamlessly into existing workflows, supporting doctors and nurses, while improving the way that healthcare organizations care for the entirety of their patient populations,” Acupera CEO Dr. Ronald Razmi said in the statement.

Some of the major partners and customers the company currently collaborates with include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the University of California San Francisco, Harvard University, St. Vincent Health, Accion Labs, and Hiteks Corporation.

Recently, Acupera’s system has been deployed at St. Vincent Medical Center, a 22-hospital system in Indianapolis, Indiana. At St. Vincent’s, a suite of cloud software services from Acupera is being used to proactively manage patients’ health, including specific health risks such as diabetes.

The latest funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Whittemore Collection, will be used to grow the company’s product development team and expand its customer implementation group.

“For our first institutional round of funding, we selected Lightspeed Venture Partners as they understand the pressure our customers are under and the unique solution Acupera offers,” Razmi said.

The company is based in San Francisco. It has raised a total $10 million to date.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/12/acupera-pulls-in-4m-to-help-health-providers-better-understand-their-patients/feed/01526020Acupera pulls in $4M to help health providers better understand their patientsThis company predicts what diseases you’ll get and helps you prevent themhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/11/22/genophen-funding/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/22/genophen-funding/#respondSat, 23 Nov 2013 00:44:27 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=864541Genophen wants to tell you what diseases you might get before you ever get them. Today it received $2 million in its third round of funding, according to a filing with Securities and Exchange Commission. The company creates software that can look at a range of details within your lifestyle and genetics that may predispose […]
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Genophen wants to tell you what diseases you might get before you ever get them.

The company creates software that can look at a range of details within your lifestyle and genetics that may predispose you to certain diseases and sicknesses. These are medical, behavioral, and environmental factors that you input into Genophen’s system. It then “assesses your risk” and provides you with what is inevitably a frightening list of illnesses you might be headed toward.

But it’s not just a fear mongering service. The technology focuses on preventative healthcare by suggesting a number of actions you can take to stop these issues from ever coming to a head.

It isn’t fully intended for the consumer, however, but rather to be used as a “clinical support tool,” for doctors to use and help walk you through.

“The platform drives better medical-decision making through physician expertise, clinical knowledge, genome interpretation, and health analytics,” the company explains on its website.

If you don’t have a primary care physician, Genophen will give you access to its network of doctors to help you find one and direct you to the necessary labwork you’ll need to give to your doctor for the program.

Genophen was founded in 2008 at Stanford and got its first round of funding in 2011 after relocating to Los Altos, Calif. It received its second round of funding in 2012. Investors listed on the filing include Babak Yazdani, and Farzad Naimi.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/22/genophen-funding/feed/0864541This company predicts what diseases you’ll get and helps you prevent themGoogle Glass in the OR: There’s an app for that, but would you trust it with your spleen?http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/17/google-glass-in-the-or-theres-an-app-for-that-but-would-you-trust-it-with-your-spleen/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/17/google-glass-in-the-or-theres-an-app-for-that-but-would-you-trust-it-with-your-spleen/#respondThu, 17 Oct 2013 17:00:22 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=839880The apps are currently being tested at the University of California, Irvine, where pilot participants have called the program "very promising." But others have voiced major concerns.
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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Remote healthcare has long been one of the most exciting promises of the Google Glass platform, and today at DEMO, we got a taste of how that would actually work.

Pristine EyeSight and Pristing CheckLists from startup Pristine are two new applications designed for surgery, anesthesia, and telemedicine in general.

EyeSight allows healthcare professionals, first responders, and others to stream video to and from Google Glass units as well as iOS, Android, and Windows PCs to better perform operations, conduct consultations, and teach or train.

CheckLists generates voice-driven directions for doctors, technicians, nurses, and other staff to help coordinate around patient care and ensure compliance.

The apps are currently being tested at the University of California, Irvine, where pilot participants have called the program “very promising.”

Both applications will become widely available when Google Glass starts shipping, likely toward the end of 2013 or the beginning of 2014, the company stated in a release on the launch.

“We have ER doctors and OR doctors beaming video to nurses for consults whenever they like,” said founder and CEO Kyle Samani onstage today. He continued that tablet and phone competitors lead to a “clunky” patient-professional experience.

“[Surgeons] have already been doing telerobotic surgery and using Google+ Hangouts,” Samani continued. “You don’t get a tactile feel, but we provide the best experience for remote surgery.

“It’s going to be pretty rough for other companies to do this.”

For the future, the team is looking into more avenues, such as prescriptions, emergency rooms, and intensive care units.

As Texas Tech’s chief medical officer Arun Matthews put it in a recent VentureBeat interview, “Industry giants will not be willing to gamble on such a venture until there is either a huge public outcry or the government mandates this level of innovation as the front-end standard for electronic health records. I’d say we’re looking at at least five years.”

But the tech industry, particularly investors, are looking through those years with optimism and eagerness.

“All kinds of tasks in enterprise and business are done so much better hands-free, but the ones that are most attractive to me are in health care,” said investor John Doerr in a recent VentureBeat interview.

“It’s so screwed up. But you can imagine all the knowledge workers in a hospital having Glass and making better decisions.”

Six-month-old Pristin is based in Austin, Tex., and has raised a seed round of $500,000. The company was part of the Capital Factory incubator, and its three founders all have backgrounds in healthcare as well as policy and technology.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/17/google-glass-in-the-or-theres-an-app-for-that-but-would-you-trust-it-with-your-spleen/feed/0839880Google Glass in the OR: There’s an app for that, but would you trust it with your spleen?Want money? Investor legend John Doerr names his top 3 verticalshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/09/11/want-money-investor-legend-john-doerr-names-his-top-3-verticals/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/11/want-money-investor-legend-john-doerr-names-his-top-3-verticals/#respondWed, 11 Sep 2013 17:29:01 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=811385When one of the biggest names in venture capital says, "The largest new opportunities in technologies are in ... ," you listen.
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SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the biggest names in venture capital says, “The largest new opportunities in technologies are in … ,” you listen.

John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins fame took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about his top three picks for verticals ripe for innovation.

They are, in order, healthcare, education, and revolutionary hardware.

Insurance companies are telling doctors what to do. If we put the doctors in charge and paid them for value, we could transform the economy.” Obamacare, he said, “helps enormously” with this drive toward a better healthcare system.

This also crosses over into consumer applications, he revealed.

“The most recent investment I made was in MyFitnessPal,” Doerr said. “They built a profitable business on their own savings. They’ve got 45 million users around the world, and their users last year lost 100 million pounds.”

When asked about the value of traditional higher education, Doerr responded, “I think [young people] should go to college if they have the opportunity,” but he agreed that most degree programs are prohibitively expensive.

Then, there’s hardware at an enterprise scale. Moore’s Law is running out of time, Doerr said. “At some point, you don’t have enough atoms. The price of the next-gen facility is increasing at a rate more than Moore’s Law.”

In response to that trend, KPCB has created an initiative called Low-Power Everywhere. This includes research and investment in companies that promote battery efficiency, display energy efficiency, and all kinds of initiatives for greener devices and better use of energy resources.

“The game changer would be to … triple the energy density in batteries. We’ve got a venture working on that.” With lighter, more powerful batteries, Doerr said, “My dream is that we could make electric vehicles as cheap or cheaper than internal combustion.”

ClearDATA, a startup working in healthcare and cloud computing, has pulled together a tidy $7 million in its second round of institutional funding.

The funding came from Excel Venture Management and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and will be used mostly for marketing and sales.

ClearDATA focuses on making secure, HIPPA-, HITECH Act-, and ePHI-compliant cloud software for healthcare professionals and organizations. Its platform is designed to cut costs while improving productivity and regulatory compliance.

“ClearDATA is an outstanding company with the potential to make a major impact on the nation’s healthcare industry by helping organizations reduce IT costs, improve infrastructure reliability, enhance productivity, and increase security and compliance,” Excel managing director Enrico Petrillo said in a statement on the funding,

Healthcare organizations have always had to tread more carefully than other companies when it comes to cloud computing technologies. But for compliant solutions, there’s a $35 billion market for health IT.

ClearDATA is based in Phoenix, Ariz. The company took an undisclosed round of funding from Norwest Venture Partners and others in March 2012.

“What we do is dramatically reduce the cost of health care — and we do that by keeping healthy people out of the hospital,” says Mike Holt, chief executive of Connected Health, in the video below.

The cost of mobile health devices, combined with low-cost cloud data alternatives, have made it easier than ever for companies to keep health care costs down by monitoring and helping people monitor their own health and fitness.

The return, Holt says, is large, both in terms of cost reduction and efficacy.

“Patients that have more information — real time information — have better results.”

But, Holt adds, re-admittance rates go down using his company’s e-health monitoring system, because health care organizations can help manage patients’ health and advise them before they go back to the hospital.

We recorded this video at VentureBeat’s recent MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. Check it out!

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VentureHealth has launched its online equity crowdfunding platform for life sciences companies. It provides accredited investors with opportunities to invest in innovative medical technology that ultimately saves lives and improves patient care.

“Ultimately, we hope that this model could help change the landscape for biomedical financing,” said cofounder Andrew Farquharson. “Since our focus is on breakthroughs in healthcare, success translates to dramatic improvements in clinical outcomes.”

The company uses a “carried-interest” model, which means that it only sees returns if its portfolio companies do, rather than a broker/dealer commission-based model. Farquharson said this approach is in line with traditional venture capital funds and means VentureHealth has a strong incentive to only select the most promising opportunities.

The goal is to increase the supply of capital to exciting biomedical companies and make it easier for individual investors to put money into this sector, which is generally reserved for venture capitalists. Venture capitalists, however, are turning their interests elsewhere, which presents an issue for startups, companies, scientists, and entrepreneurs.

“The life science venture financing environment remains challenging, with an increasingly short supply of capital despite factors such as aging world populations and rising living standards in developing countries that will help support long-run demand for life science innovation,” said partner Matt Rossiter. “While funding from corporate investors, wealthy individuals, and disease foundations is helping to fill some of the gap, entrepreneurs that plan to seek venture capital financing would do well to carefully consider factors, such as capital efficiency and a faster path to exit, that can increase the odds of raising scarce funding.”

VentureHealth is stepping in to address these problems. Farquharson and cofounder Mir Imran have extensive experience in medical investing. Farquharson spent two decades building, restructuring, and acquiring life sciences companies, and Imran has founded more than 20 life sciences companies and holds more than 200 patents. They previously founded InCube Ventures, a life science venture capital firm focused on solving unmet clinical needs for large patient populations. As crowdfunding and online investment platforms grew in popularity and gained legitimacy, they saw an opportunity to bring investment opportunities to interested individuals.

Channel Medsystems, a startup developing “next-generation cryoablation technologies,” raised $875,000 on VentureHealth as part of its $9.7 million Series B round.

Healthfundr is another recently launched equity-based crowdfunding platform for health startups although it focuses on opportunities in health IT, digital health, and diagnostic and medical devices. In contrast to the life sciences sector, digital health is taking off, and funding is actually on the rise. There is a lot of buzz surrounding digital health right now as changes in national policy affect care providers and mobile technology opens up a whole new world of possibilities. These areas are new and exciting, but life sciences and biomedical tech are crucial parts of the healthcare ecosystem, and they aren’t (and can’t) go anywhere. If funding slows, chances are medical innovation will too, and that’s a pretty scary thought.

VentureHealth is based in San Jose, California.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/12/venturehealths-crowdfunding-portal-gets-blood-flowing-into-ailing-life-sciences-sector/feed/0757233VentureHealth’s crowdfunding portal gets blood flowing into ailing life sciences sectorChange.org CEO shows how online petitions change the face of health care (Q&A)http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/change-org-health-petitions/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/change-org-health-petitions/#commentsFri, 17 May 2013 18:47:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=739589Online petitions are playing a more crucial role in the healthcare industry every day. Change.org is right in the middle of it.
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When people run into major problems with the health industry — trying to get money from insurance companies or to get access to an experimental drug, for example — they’re no longer just turning to lawyers. Increasingly, they’re turning to online petitions.

One petition website, Change.org, has already seen over 7,000 health-related petitions come through — with some big successes.

Chief executive Ben Rattray, who is speaking at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference next week in San Francisco, explained that that he has seen people successfully take on big-name organizations like the USDA and insurance providers — and those successes inspire him. Indeed, healthcare companies are often quite inaccessible despite the fact that they’re involved in such a sensitive and critical aspect of life.

Change.org isn’t focused exlusively on healthcare or health tech. The company helps people petition specific leaders on any issue. But health-related issues have quickly become one of the most popular topics on the site.

We chatted with Rattray to see just where his company fits into the healthcare conversation:

VentureBeat: What role does Change.org feel it plays in grassroots health activism?

Ben Rattray: Our role is to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see. We’re an open platform and therefore don’t advocate for campaigns ourselves, but we are a place where parents and siblings and friends who haven’t been able to make their voices heard are starting petitions on behalf of their suffering loved ones. We think people deserve to be part of the decisions being made that affect their lives, so we’ve created a tool that gives them a voice in that conversation.

VentureBeat: How many campaigns has Change.org hosted and what kinds have you seen?

Rattray: More than 7,000 people have started health-related petitions on Change.org, covering every health topic imaginable. One of the most popular topics is around medical coverage from major insurers. For example, last year a young man from DC named Jason Warren successfully petitioned Blue Cross Blue Shield to cover his father’s recovery from a heart attack after gathering 190,000 signatures — a shift we have seen many insurers make in response to petitions. Another popular topic is healthy food; in one campaign last year, Bettina Siegel, a mom in Texas, successfully petitioned the USDA to stop packing “pink slime” in school lunches in just one week with more than 250,000 signatures – after health advocates had been working on the issue for 10 years.

VentureBeat: Why is this, in today’s digital age, more powerful than picking up the phone and talking to your representative?

Rattray: There’s still value in many types of civic action, including picking up the phone. But on a phone call, you’re just one person with an opinion. On a petition, you’re a member of a collective movement, and your voice is shared publicly for everyone to see. Even if they want to, there’s no way a government official or company can ignore your comment – it’s like a highly visible time capsule of public sentiment.

Take Jenn McNary, the mother of two boys with a rare, lethal disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. One of her boys had access to a medical trial for a new drug, and his condition improved dramatically. Her other boy doesn’t have the trial drug, and his muscles are deteriorating rapidly. Soon, he’ll lose all upper body strength, and he won’t be able to eat or drink on his own.

Jenn’s petition asks the FDA to approve the medication through the Accelerated Approval Program, which expedites approval of drugs that treat serious diseases. Jenn could have picked up the phone – and trust me, she has, many, many times. But it was her petition, with its 179,000 signatures, many from parents of other DMD-afflicted kids, that got her a meeting with senior FDA officials. Jenn just sent us an email a few weeks ago saying they were “extremely supportive, engaging, and receptive” to her ideas – so things are looking up. That’s the power of the Change.org platform.

VentureBeat: Do you believe Change.org is really making a difference? Can you point to any successful campaigns?

Rattray: We’ve seen hundreds of health-related victories. The 28-year-old UC Davis student whose radiation treatment was finally covered by Anthem after four long weeks of appeals. The 21-year-old severely disabled student who got Medicare to continue her nursing care through the end of college, when she could move back home for support from her family. The Ohio woman who got Governor Kasich to add autism benefits to the state’s essential health benefits package. The list goes on and on. The question of whether petitions can have an impact is by now clearly answered – they can and do every day.

VentureBeat: Do you see spikes in health petitions around current events?

Rattray: We may see a small spike around, say, the Affordable Care Act — people who want it passed, people who don’t want it passed — but in general, it’s pretty consistent. That’s because our platform is really built for micro-movements: small, personal petitions replicated hundreds or thousands of times over across cities, states, even countries. At Change.org, we deeply believe in the power of starting local and building movements from the ground up instead of jumping on huge national problems and trying to tackle them from the top down.

VentureBeat: What role can social media sites play in health activism? Are they too unorganized to make a real difference?

Rattray: Social media sites can play a crucial role in raising awareness about health issues. Where they sometimes fall short, though, is translating that awareness into effective, coordinated action. That’s where Change.org comes in; because our platform is built explicitly to make changing the world intuitive and easy, it’s generally more effective than social media sites not structured for that purpose.

VentureBeat: Why should people use Change.org for health-related issues over creating a White House petition online?

Rattray: We’re big fans of the folks working on We the People, the White House’s petition platform. Over the past few months, we’ve actually worked with them on building out their API.

The Change.org platform is unique not only because it lets anyone start a petition about anything they care about, but also because people can target whichever decision maker has the power to do something. If the issue is political, sometimes that’s the Obama administration, but more often than not, it’s the director of a smaller government agency or the head of a specific task force. For non-political issues — say, an insurance provider who won’t cover a loved one’s medical treatment — you can use Change.org to petition the right people there, too. And it works — thousands of people have won their petitions using our site.

VentureBeat: If you could ask tech companies for any one thing to help Change.org health petitions get more attention, what would it be?

Rattray: Send us your engineers — we’re hiring.

Ben Rattray photo via Chrissy Farr/VentureBeat

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/change-org-health-petitions/feed/1739589Change.org CEO shows how online petitions change the face of health care (Q&A)5 ways robots are invading — and improving — hospitalshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/5-ways-robots-are-invading-and-improving-hospitals/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/5-ways-robots-are-invading-and-improving-hospitals/#respondWed, 15 May 2013 20:13:26 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=736547While hospital robots sound like the stuff of the future, the technology is already in wide use today.
]]> If you’ve been waiting for the day when robot doctors will cut you open, monitor you recovery, and keep you company in your hospital room, you won’t have to wait much longer.

“We’re in the first inning of a nine-inning exercise. The average patient walks in a hospital and is not touched by robotics. That’s going to change in 10 years,” said John Simon, a partner at Boston-based investment firm Sigma Prime Ventures.

That adoption rate, Simon argues, is based on cost: As the price of robotics adoption decreases, hospitals may be more likely to invest in new technology. At their core, robots aren’t all that different from any other hospital gear.

The problem for hospitals, however, is that there’s a danger in pursuing robotics too far. “With medical robots, if you automate something too much, people won’t accept it,” Simon said.

This results in a fine line that hospitals and doctors must manage. While some automation and robotics is good, the last thing a hospital wants to do is embrace robots to such an extent that they alienate patients.

Little of that, however, is on the minds of hospitals today. Right now, most of them are just trying to figure out how to get robots in the front door. Here are a few ways robots are changing hospitals today.

Zapping germs and cutting infection rates

In hospitals, fewer things are more lethal than the average bacterium. Approximately 1.7 million people get sick each year as a result of so-called “health care-associated infections,” and 99,000 of them die. So you might say that tackling this issue is a major problem for hospitals.

One potential fix is Xenex, a 5-foot, 2-inch robot that fights bacteria by flashing hospital rooms with ultraviolet light. This light, which comes from a Xenon bulb, damages the cell walls of bacteria, frying their DNA and preventing them from reproducing. (The light is so powerful that even humans have to leave the room while the Xenex is working its magic.)

While Xenex has only been around since 2009, evidence suggests that it’s working pretty well so far. Cone Health System, a health care provider in North Carolina, says that Healthcare-Associated Infections dropped over 40 percent after it started using Xenex. Another hospital, Massachusetts’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital, says that Xenex’s helped cut rates of infection of Clostridium difficile by 82 percent, according to a Xenex case study.

Keeping doctors present … even when they aren’t

Fewer companies are as well known in the robotics world as iRobot, the creator of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. But while iRobot is dominating the consumer space, it’s also doing some interesting things areas like defense, naval exploration and, in particular, health care.

Among its health care products is Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant (RP-VITA), a tablet-controlled telepresence bot it developed alongside InTouch Health. Unveiled last July, the RP-VITA lets doctors care for patients remotely, allowing them consult with patients even when they’re miles away.

Reception to the idea has been pretty strong so far. Not only has the device been commercially deployed in seven American hospitals but the RP-VITA is also the first telemedicine robot approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Telemedicine is officially a thing.

Letting amputees walk again

While some robots are mostly about improving patients’ in-hospital experiences, device’s like the BiOM prosthetic ankle system are improving their whole lives. Developed by Boston-based robotics firm iWalk, the BiOM solves one of the less-advertised problems with conventional prosthetics: They’re exhausting to use.

“When people wear prosthetics, they are providing all the power themselves and sort of dragging this leg around,” notes Sigma Prime’s John Simon, whose firm invests in iWalk.

The problem is one of angles. When we walk up ramps or take stairs, our ankles rarely stay at one angle — but that’s exactly how most prosthetics force wearers to walk around. This is why the BiOM is so effective: Instead of forcing the wearer to power it with their own bodies, it powers itself. And that makes a huge difference.

The only problem with the BiOM is cost: The device runs for $50,000. And while that’s not cheap, it’s a small price to pay for amputees looking to walk around freely again.

Helping doctors cut you open

If you’re a surgeon operating today, it’s hard not to be at least a bit enticed by robotic surgery. Surgical robots promise the capability to operate on patients quickly, accurately, and with fewer of the side-effects associated with traditional surgery. By creating smaller incisions, robotic surgery (which is mostly just robot-assisted surgery at this point) cuts blood loss and reduces recovery time (which means patients leave hospitals earlier). Adding to the intrigue is the possibility of remote surgery, which enables doctors to operate on patient from halfway across the world.

The interest is real: Market leader Intuitive Surgical, which creates the da Vinci surgical robot, says its product was used in 450,000 procedures last year.

The problem is that robotic surgery systems are really expensive. Systems like the da Vinci cost at least $1.5 million, and for a lot of hospitals, it’s tough to justify that sort of investment. More, robotic surgery systems carry with them significant liabilities, as Intuitive Robotics found out earlier this year. In February, the FDA launched a probe into claims that the Da Vinci was causing post-operation complications for patients. Intuitive surgical maintains that adverse event rates are low, but the debate over the company’s products is ongoing.

Still, in spite of this recent skepticism, robotic surgery remains a popular option for procedures like prostate cancer extraction, which, due to the, er, difficulty of access, is often better left to robot hands than those of humans.

Keeping patients and the elderly company

If all of this talk about amputees, bacteria, and botched operations has got you down, I offer the Paro, a well-known therapeutics robot developed by Japanese research company AIST. Paro has a very simple but very important job: It’s supposed to feel like a pet. Similar to the that ancient tabby that your grandmother’s nursing home keeps around, Paro relaxes patients in ways that other humans can’t. Aist, which was developed over 10 years ago, still remains one of the most well-known robots of its kind.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/5-ways-robots-are-invading-and-improving-hospitals/feed/07365475 ways robots are invading — and improving — hospitalsHealthfundr launches equity-based crowdfunding for health startupshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/09/healthfundr-launches-equity-based-crowdfunding-for-health-startups/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/09/healthfundr-launches-equity-based-crowdfunding-for-health-startups/#respondThu, 09 May 2013 16:00:17 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=733871Healthfundr connects health startups with accredited investors to drive funding and attention to this challenging sector.
]]>Healthfundr launched today at the intersection of some of the hottest trends in the tech world.

Healthfundr is an equity-based crowdfunding platform for health startups. The site provides accredited investors with opportunities to invest in a selection of curated companies working on digital health, health IT, and diagnostic and medical devices.

CEO Jared Iverson is a former securities attorney with experience working for a pharmaceutical company. He founded Healthfundr in response to shifts he observed in both industries.

“The company is rooted in a desire to see more innovation and capital around health and medical innovation,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “A lot of capital goes to areas that are easier to understand or have less regulation, and I’d love to see this sector become more mainstream. This is an area that has a huge impact on quality of life.”

Healthfundr is only open to accredited investors. As of today’s launch, it features three vetted companies that are looking to raise capital. Unlike other equity-based crowdfunding sites like TheFundersClub or CircleUp, Healthfundr works with later stage companies that already have traction and are looking to raise larger amounts. Iverson said there is no shortage of seed funding or later stage capital for health companies, but many struggle to receive first rounds of institutional funding. Healthfundr is meant to be a place where companies that have traction in the market can raise growth capital of a few million dollars.

“Health startups often have to overcome regulatory hurdles and require a higher degree of sophistication and more capital from investors,” said Iverson. “One of the unique difficulties is getting investors to follow-on. We want to fill this hole by being selective about the companies we choose so investors feel more confident in their ability to carry out due diligence.”

Healthfundr is a registered broker-dealer and will take a small portion of the capital raise, either in the form of equity or cash compensation. Iverson’s ultimate goal is to become the main hub for health and medical technology deals and drive funding and interest into this space.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/09/healthfundr-launches-equity-based-crowdfunding-for-health-startups/feed/0733871Healthfundr launches equity-based crowdfunding for health startupsThese are the top 5 BYOD issues facing the healthcare industryhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/04/26/top-5-byod-issues-facing-healthcare-industry/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/26/top-5-byod-issues-facing-healthcare-industry/#respondFri, 26 Apr 2013 18:32:45 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=725784GUEST: Many hospital IT organizations across the globe are beginning to deploy bring-your-own-device strategies. But they must be prepared to face these five major issues head on.
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This is a guest post by Chris Crowell, president and CEO of Enterasys.

The rate at which doctors are choosing to bring mobile devices to work continues to rise at an alarming rate. In fact, a recent study from Jackson & Coker found that four out of five physicians regularly use their mobile devices for medical purposes.

At the same time, patients and guests are also increasing their use of personal wireless devices in hospitals and healthcare facilities. While there are proven benefits in these situations, such as quicker access to patient records, the influx of devices also has some serious drawbacks.

Most often, those looking at the negatives are quick to point out patient privacy issues and the fact that patient information could be jeopardized. But a host of other concerns are also associated with this movement, such as the enormous burden it puts on the network and IT resources.

To help alleviate the side effects from the transition to mobile, hospital IT organizations across the globe are beginning to deploy bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies. In order to provide the flexible resources required to manage a comprehensive BYOD strategy that maintains costs, control, and security, IT must be prepared to face the following five issues head on.

Network support

A recent report from Spyglass Consulting Group found that 69 percent of surveyed hospital nurses use smartphones for personal and clinical communications while on the job. That, added to the statistic above about physicians, equals a huge strain on the hospital’s network.

With the influx of end-user devices accessing the hospital network comes the demand for consistent, reliable, and continuously available connectivity, especially on the hospital wireless LAN. Federal standards call for institutions to deploy a single network to handle the needs of the medical devices as well as provide a standard of interoperability for securing all data on the clinical wireless LAN. Moving forward, hospital IT professionals must explore next-generation networking solutions that are highly available, scalable, and ubiquitous.

Lost devices

If you work for a company where you’re given a mobile device, the assumption is that IT bears the responsibility for the tracking and replacement of those that go missing. Healthcare organizations must rethink this traditional model as more devices brought into the workplace are personally, not company, owned.

Mobile device management (MDM) of personal devices is something that has historically kept health IT professionals up, yet most are only doing the bare minimum at best to control it. There must be a balance in strategy that takes into account the need to be noninvasive, yet law abiding. When dealing with patient information, anything that contains data covered by HIPAA needs to be secured, and those devices need to be able to be wiped clean.

Mixing personal and professional use of mobile devices

In the near future, mobile computing devices in clinical environments will be just as common as they are in real life. Those devices will serve a dual purpose, as doctors and other professionals use the same mobile phone to call/text home as they do to access patient information.

We’re already hearing concerns from clinicians about BYOD around the loss of privacy for personal communications, the idea that personal devices may compromise professional behavior, and the concern that procedures may not be clear around professional vs. personal use on personal devices. BYOD in this environment requires a shift in culture that revolves around transparency. Without it, policy-makers and users will butt heads and neither side will achieve what they’re after.

Application deployment

Currently, there are more than 20,000 mHealth applications in the marketplace, and that number is growing across all mobile platforms. Most hospitals are using application layer firewall and unified threat management in order to deploy and monitor applications safely and securely, and remain in compliance with HIPAA.

These strategies have proved to be beneficial when it comes to personally owned devices. However, they also raise concerns about performance degradation and scalability. Deploying and supporting diverse applications can be troublesome, especially with the magnitude of devices involved. IT and the mobile workforce must have the same goal in mind — patient safety and protection. From there, they can put clear policies in place.

Ruggedized devices

Hospitals are not the safest place for a mobile device. There are fluids and other harsh operating conditions that can be challenging. The conditions are drastically different from those of a standard office. At the same time, it’s unlikely that clinicians have the safeguards in place to protect their devices from cross-contamination from hospital to hospital.

The question is, should the responsibility of the sanitation and hardening of the personal device fall on IT, or should the clinician assume responsibility when deciding to use their own device in the treatment of patients? This factor cannot be ignored when deploying a BYOD strategy.

Final thoughts

BYOD isn’t a passing fad. It’s here to stay, and organizations need to establish strategies and best practices to handle this ever-changing landscape. The organizations that successfully deploy BYOD initiatives have the ability to transform clinical workflows, streamline processes, improve physician access to information, and improve overall patient care.

Chris Crowell is President and CEO of Enterasys. He works with several healthcare organizations looking to expand WiFi for BYOD. Some notable customers include Henry Ford Health System and Western Maryland Health System.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/26/top-5-byod-issues-facing-healthcare-industry/feed/0725784These are the top 5 BYOD issues facing the healthcare industryHow health tech can support the aging baby boomer populationhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/04/09/how-health-tech-can-support-the-aging-baby-boomer-population/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/09/how-health-tech-can-support-the-aging-baby-boomer-population/#respondTue, 09 Apr 2013 18:33:03 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=711700GUEST: Over the next decade, the healthcare system will need to adapt to the influx of baby boomers, many of whom will have chronic diseases and need continued care.
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This is a guest post by health executive Alicia Torres

Advancements in medicine and treatments have increased the life expectancy for baby boomers. Almost 87 million Americans, or one in four, will be 65 or older by 2050, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Both these trends have many implications for hospitals and healthcare organizations. Over the next decade, the healthcare system will need to adapt to the influx of baby boomers, many of whom will have chronic diseases and need continued care. A recent study by the West Virginia University School of Medicine found that about 39 percent of baby boomers were obese, compared to about 29 percent of the previous generation, and approximately 16 percent had diabetes, compared to 12 percent of the previous generation.

The aging generation of baby boomers had been a concern for the healthcare industry for some years. Now, technology solutions are beginning to serve a vital role in creating the change needed to propel the healthcare industry to care for the influx of patients.

Healthcare technology today

Technology implementation in healthcare today is mainly driven by government incentives. In 2009, the first electronic health record (EHR) mandates were enacted by the HITECH law and included financial incentives provided by the Health and Human Services Departments.

EHR implementation has taken off over the last few years, with nearly $10 billion in EHR incentives distributed as of December 2012. One of the core reasons hospitals and healthcare providers are adopting EHRs is to improve patient safety. While there are other benefits, such as saving time and cost, the objective of EHRs is to correctly identify patients through the continuum of care, ensuring procedures and check-ups are being recorded, as well as easing medical administration.

In order for that to happen, the EHR solutions need to fit seamlessly into the healthcare practice’s existing software solutions and infrastructure. Barcode technology creates a critical link between the patient and the clinician. If, for instance, a patient is unable to verbally identify himself or his medical problems, a clinician can scan a barcode wristband and have access to that patient’s EHR immediately, which can inform the course of action. The clinician spends less time tracking down patient records, and more time with the patient.

EHR and barcode technology implementation seamlessly links patients and clinicians; however, it is only the beginning for healthcare technology.

Connecting patients, clinicians and data

In an effort to provide the best care while adapting to the influx of baby boomers, hospitals and healthcare organizations are turning to connected health. Connected health is the idea of providing healthcare services remotely, through flexible, at home care. Managing chronic diseases, maintaining health and wellness, or ensuring patients are not readmitted following hospital treatment are all issues that connected health helps to solve. Additionally, with more patients being treated in their homes, we can decrease the amount patients admitted to hospitals.

Connected health can help solve the impending issue of the influx of baby boomers into the healthcare system, and technology is at the center of it, powering interoperability and linking patients to clinicians to their data. By leveraging technology solutions, healthcare organizations can provide care to patients outside of the typical medical setting, consulting at home, over the phone or via video. In using technology while caring for a patient, clinicians have immediate access to the patient’s medical history, pulled from the hospital IT system, and can direct the course of treatment in real-time.

Connected health also allows clinicians to use mobile devices to deliver care or information to a patient on the spot. This is known as mobile health, or mHealth. By using tablets, mobile printers and other point-of-care solutions, clinicians can take specimen collections, issue medical or dietary information and print prescriptions. In tandem with these activities, clinicians record their course of action, medications administered, patient status and next steps. The collected information is priceless data for hospitals and healthcare organizations. In analyzing this data, new processes or improved efficiencies are discovered; all the while elevating the quality of care a patient receives.

What to expect in the future

As connected health begins to take off, the Internet of Things (IoT) will play a larger role in healthcare information technology. Based on the definition shared in the survey “Building Value from Visibility: 2012 Enterprise Internet of Things Adoption Outlook,” 85 percent of organizations surveyed agree that Internet of Things solutions are made up of smart interconnected devices that provide more visibility into the organization’s operational events.

For healthcare, this means better visibility inside hospitals and healthcare organizations, as well as outside the typical medical setting and in the home. More importantly, IoT can provide more visibility into a patient’s status.

As seen at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, broader IoT adoption is in full swing. In fact, 53 percent of organizations are planning to implement an IoT solution in the next 24 months, according to “Building Value from Visibility.” The healthcare industry has an even more aggressive adoption rate, with almost 60% of healthcare organizations planning to implement IoT solutions within the next two years. The gained benefits from IoT adoption that healthcare respondents noted include improved delivery process (72 percent), improved safety (66 percent), supply chain visibility (63 percent) and loss prevention (63 percent).

There are already startups developing IoT solutions for healthcare organizations specific to certain areas of inventory management and patient check-in. In the future, IoT has the ability to elevate healthcare even more, and specifically, connected health practices. Patient wristbands, medical equipment and beds encoded with sensors can track status in real-time and make hospital workflow processes more efficient. Health monitors, sensors and RFID technology at one’s home can transfer data to the hospital every minute. Hospitals and healthcare organizations will be able to consistently monitor and provide care, even if clinicians are not working with a patient in-person.

We have the opportunity to change the healthcare industry and evolve with the aging population. With the right solutions and infrastructure, technology can deliver on one of the healthcare industry’s biggest goals: providing the best care possible and creating a safe environment for patients.

Alicia Torres is the healthcare global practice leader for Zebra Technologies Corporation, a recognized global leader in technologies that extend real-time visibility into business operations. At Zebra, Alicia is responsible for expanding the global healthcare market with new and existing solutions for customers.

Alicia has over 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry, with positions including a hospital financial executive, an internal strategy consultant for a large, public healthcare company and a successful entrepreneur. In 1997, she founded Rosebud Solutions, a healthcare software firm that offered five software programs to address various areas of operations within hospitals. Prior to founding Rosebud Solutions, Alicia was the director of the health economics group at Kinetic Concepts Inc., whose products provide wound healing therapies and technologies. Alicia earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Pan. For more information please visit www.zebra.com.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/09/how-health-tech-can-support-the-aging-baby-boomer-population/feed/0711700How health tech can support the aging baby boomer populationWellDoc is the next med-tech acquisition, sources sayhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/04/05/welldoc-is-the-next-med-tech-acquisition-sources-say/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/05/welldoc-is-the-next-med-tech-acquisition-sources-say/#respondFri, 05 Apr 2013 19:09:04 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=711595Sources are telling us that chronic disease management startup WellDoc is looking for a buyer.
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Sources are telling us that WellDoc, a startup that provides chronic disease management solutions, has found a buyer.

Elite health incubator Rock Health substantiated the rumor that WellDoc has been shopping for an acquirer in a blog post.

Last we heard from WellDoc in August 2012, the company announced its intent to raise $10 million in funding. An SEC filing revealed that the company secured $500,000, so funding may be drying up (unless there is something we’ve missed.)

Among the potential buyers, one source suggested that healthcare management giant Alere is interested, given that they inked a deal to market WellDoc’s diabetes tracker.

A spokesperson from WellDoc declined to comment on the acquisition.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/05/welldoc-is-the-next-med-tech-acquisition-sources-say/feed/0711595WellDoc is the next med-tech acquisition, sources sayRock Health predicts a record year for digital health dealshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/04/03/rockhealth-predicts-a-record-year-for-digital-health-deals/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/03/rockhealth-predicts-a-record-year-for-digital-health-deals/#respondThu, 04 Apr 2013 00:24:48 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=710305Digital health incubator Rock Health released data today that shows an increase in funding for med-tech startups in the first quarter of 2013.
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Digital health incubator Rock Health released data today that shows an increase in funding for med-tech startups in the first quarter of 2013.

Thirty-seven health deals were valued at a total of $365 million, which is 35 percent higher than the first quarter of 2012, “suggesting that 2013 will be another record year for the digital health industry,” the blog post reads.

Rock Health cofounder Halle Tecco said the uptick in venture investment was matched by several acquisitions, including UnitedHealth Group’s buy-up of Humedica (a deal that was reportedly valued in the hundreds of millions). “The players seem to be especially heating up their M&A engines,” she said.

According to Rock Health, the largest and most notable deals of the quarter include:

Audax Health, led by a 23-year-old college dropout, raised $21 million from former Apple CEO John Sculley

Kareo raised a $20.5 million sixth round to build out its medical office software

Mobile health company PatientSafe Solutions raised a $20 million third round from Merck Global Health Innovation

What’s coming up in 2013? Tecco predicts a booming demand for wearable devices from companies like Jawbone, Misfit Wearables, MC10, and Basis. She said Fitbit has been shopping for a $30 million round, which was leaked to the press, but to her knowledge, the deal has not yet closed.

Remote patient monitoring is another rapidly-growing digital health market, which increased to $10.6 billion last year, according to a report by Kalorama Information. Rock Health points to a handful of startups that received funding this quarter, including Bam Labs, a sleep monitoring device placed under a mattress to detect movement and heart rate, and Independa, an independent living solution for the elderly.

Other areas to watch include personalized health and cloud-based electronic health records. On the other hand, bio-tech and medical device entrepreneurs are struggling to gain investment due to complex regulatory issues. Read more on Rock Health’s research here.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/03/rockhealth-predicts-a-record-year-for-digital-health-deals/feed/0710305Rock Health predicts a record year for digital health dealsPeter Thiel-backed MetaMed brings personalized health care — but only to the 1 percenthttp://venturebeat.com/2013/03/01/peter-thiel-backed-metamed-brings-personalized-health-care-to-the-1-percent/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/01/peter-thiel-backed-metamed-brings-personalized-health-care-to-the-1-percent/#respondFri, 01 Mar 2013 22:02:08 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=631453Futurist and entrepreneur Michael Vassar has a bone to pick with the U.S. medical system. He hopes to "humiliate" it into providing better quality care by creating a "product that works better than the system."
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Futurist and entrepreneur Michael Vassar has an issue with the U.S. medical system. He hopes to “humiliate” it into providing better quality care by creating a “product that works better than the system.”

With $500,000 in startup investment from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, he has handpicked a crack team of physicians and software engineers (including Skype founder Jaan Tallinn) for a new health care company called MetaMed. The goal is to leverage data and statistics to take the guesswork out of medicine.

“It seems very possible to add 10 or 20 years of healthy life expectancy to a person who gathers all the relevant data today,” said Vassar in an interview with VentureBeat.

It’s possible, but only for Metamed’s affluent private clients.

MetaMed provides high net-worth individuals with access to its team of doctors who dig deep into patient history, metabolism, genomic variation, results from companies like 23andme, and other research to deliver a full medical report.

Above: MetaMed cofounder and chief scientist Michael Vassar

He cites some terrifying statistics from recent reports to highlight the extent of the problem they are trying to solve: Over 30 percent of fatal illnesses are missed during diagnosis, doctors only spent an average of 11 minutes with patients during primary care visits — and this figure hasn’t changed since the 1930s — and cancer death rates have decreased by less than 5 percent over the past 40 years.

It’s still early days, so MetaMed’s New York-based team is primarily occupied with providing doctors with high-quality research for a tricky case or medical conference. “Doctors don’t usually have a public health or statistical background,” he explained. “So they aren’t in a position to distinguish between popular hypotheses in the medical field.”

MetaMed also works directly with patients who are suffering from a chronic condition like migraines, Lyme Disease, or even cancer. They receive varying treatment options from doctors, so turn to MetaMed for a concrete answer. “We try to figure out what the global opinion is and not just take the dominant literature position,” said Vassar.

For about $400 per hour for a doctor and $200 per hour for a senior researcher, patients will receive an in-depth report and a medical consultation to discuss the results. It’s not dissimilar from ultra high-end company Private Health Management, dubbed by the Wall Street Journalas the “doctor to the 1 percent.”

When asked about whether MetaMed will share any of its medical findings, Vassar said he is open to a conversation. But Vassar said the company is not in the business of “awareness raising” and won’t be “spending millions trying to convince the public of every finding.”

MetaMed is aware of the security and compliance issues in the health care industry, so they are clear that patients need to volunteer their personal health information. This data is stored on a secure server, and is never shared without patient’s permission.

The company is on the lookout for physicians to hire to add to its medical advisory team as it expands its service internationally. According to Vassar, one of the major challenges to growth involves recruiting doctors at the top of their field, especially those in specialties. “There are just not that many good doctors out there; not every city has even one, unfortunately,” he said.

When asked about what makes a good doctor, he said it’s those who feel that their residency forced them to “violate” the principles they learned in medical school. Vassar doesn’t go as far as outspoken entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in suggesting that technology will replace doctors, but he does believe that machines can perform a “much better job of medical diagnosis.”

The idea for MetaMed was formed when Vassar was the president of the Singularity Institute, a research organization focused on the field of Artificial Intelligence.

At that time, Steve Jobs was suffering from pancreatic cancer, prompting Vassar to consider a scenario in which the late Apple CEO brought together Nobel Prize-winning scientists and physicians from around the world to consider his case. “That is the solution we are trying to create with MetaMed,” he said.

SAN FRANCISCO — The health care industry is undergoing major surgery. At the center of these operations is Rock Health, a startup accelerator dedicated to the intersection of healthcare and technology. Today, at a demo event at the University of California San Francisco, 14 startups presented their ideas on how to transform and improve healthcare in the U.S..

Dr. Aenor Sawyer, an associate clinical professor at UCSF, said during her opening remarks that these companies are changing “how we take care of patients and how patients take care of themselves.” Whether it is managing secondary care, untangling the confusing labyrinth of insurance, or encouraging healthy lifestyle habits, these startups are holding the scalpels.

If the intersection of health and technology interests you, check out VentureBeat’s HealthBeat 2013 conference, which will focus on “Smart Hospitals” and “Smart Practices,” and how new technology can disrupt health care.

Rock Health was founded in 2010 as the first accelerator program for health startups. It currently has 49 portfolio companies, which have collectively raised over $43 million in funding from a prestigious list of investors. According to AngelList, Rock Health companies have the third highest valuations of all incubators and accelerators, following Y Combinator and StartX.

Each of the founders at today’s event had a unique story and expertise that brought them to the stage. Some come from the startup world, but many experienced these problems in the field and came to entrepreneurship as a method of solving them. Rock Health provides them with mentorship, funding, and other resources to get them off and running.

Digital health is one of the hottest trends in the tech right now. Venture capital funding in this space grew dramatically in 2012, as investors, entrepreneurs, and health care organizations from across the spectrum jumped on emerging opportunities. However, the health care industry is so massive and built on such old practices and systems that some are skeptical of a startup’s capability to effect meaningful change from the outside. A few of the startups that presented today are consumer focused, but most are targeting the enterprise and the operations of large healthcare organizations. These young, lean and energetic startups are tackling the big guys, and telling the healthcare industry itself, it needs to adopt a more active lifestyle.

Read on for notes on each company’s presentation.

The first four companies to present are still in “stealth mode” and gave brief updates on their activity and progress.

Benefitter helps employers confidently navigate health care reform, save money, and improve their employees’ well being. CEO Brian Poger said that many employees would actually be better off if they did not receive employer-sponsored health insurance. Benefitter helps them understand the legislation, set strategy, and execute it “to make the Affordable Care Act more affordable.”

SuperBetter helps people solve their health challenges by turning goal achievement into a game. The company is currently awaiting the results of a research trial with the University of Pennsylvania about how the system can help people battling mild to medium levels of depression, and other potential applications include anxiety and stress disorders, smoking cessation, and weight control.

Moxe Health improves access to care for newly insured and underserved patients by helping them find the best providers for their needs. This not only benefits patients but also health care organizations and insurance providers who want to optimize their available resources.

Mango Health makes mobile applications that inspire consumers to follow their treatment regimens. CEO Jason Oberfest said that 1 in 5 Americans take prescription drugs or supplements, but up to 75 percent don’t do it properly. “Nonadherence” is a $350 billion a year problem, and something as simple as a mobile app that makes sure people take their medication correctly can significantly reduce the amount of return hospital trips and remission.

The CEOs of the remaining 10 companies then gave longer, five minute presentations.

The first company is tackling an issue many male entrepreneurs won’t touch, but which on some level effects everyone in America.

Wildflower Health makes pregnancy healthier, safer, and more cost-effective through a mobile platform and predictive analytics. CEO Leah Sparks said that pregnancy-related costs are the number one driver of hospital costs at $86 billion a year, and two-thirds of these costs are associated with pregnancy complications. This is an issue for patients and their families, hospitals, and insurance providers. As it stands, wildly ineffective phone-based programs are the main method of risk assessment and tracking. Wildflower’s first app, Due Date, helps pregnant women track milestones customized to their due date, be aware of risk factors, and take personalized actions. The sales pipeline for its enterprise platform covers 30 million people, and they charge a fee for each person enrolled.

Sparks closed by saying that 40 babies were born during her presentation.

Wellframe combines mobile technology and artificial intelligence to extend the provision of care from the hospital to the home. The first product targets cardiac patients, who can use the system instead of regularly going on inconvenient and/or expensive follow-up visits. A patient can use the app as a “digital concierge” to personalize a daily task list that simplifies what they need to do to overcome heart disease and minimize risk.

OpenPlacement offers tools to match seniors with appropriate housing and care providers after they have been discharged from a hospital. According to CEO Dominic Scotto, over six million seniors are transferred a year to the next level of their care, but the process is inefficient and frustrating across the board. Patients receive list of possible facilities that is often out of date and missing information. On OpenPlacement, clinicians can search for placements based on available beds, geography, budget, required services, and the level of care. So far, 500 paying care providers use the service.

Wello makes fitness more personal, accessible, and affordable by using live, two-way video to connect fitness trainers and clients. The platform makes it easy to work out anytime, anywhere, targeting the 89 percent of Americans who wish they were more fit. Wello also just launched a Group Workouts feature that lets users exercise with other people, whether it is a group of pregnant women, middle-aged men trying to lose weight, or someone in California that wants to exercise with her best friend in New York.

LabDoor tells you “what’s real” in consumer products, beginning with safety and efficacy ratings for the $36 billion supplements market. CEO Neil Thanedar said that this industry is mostly unregulated, and yet consumers have a right to know what is in the supplements they take and give to their children. LabDoor tests the products in chemistry labs to find quality and purity data and offers this to consumers. “The results are amazing and scary,” he said. “Over 70 percent of products being tested had inaccurate label data, and over 90 percent contain contaminants. We want to change the base of the industry from marketing hype to real facts and build consumer trust.” Their next milestone is to have full ratings and reviews for 1,000 products and to someday expand into other industries like cosmetics and organics.

Eligible streamlines insurance eligibility checks for doctors and patients. Founder Katelyn Gleason said that the systems used to transport health information between patients, hospitals, insurance companies, labs, and pharmacies costs $150 billion a year, and the transactions are done using “archaic processing” technology that take full IT teams to run. She wondered why, in the middle of Silicon Valley, no one was building a better, simpler, more efficient system. Using Eligible’s API, software engineers can integrate health exchange protocols using three lines of code and connect instantly with over 700 health insurance companies. Eligible runs in the cloud, in the background in real time, and takes $.05 from every transaction.

Beam Technologies makes the Beam Brush, a connected toothbrush to improve oral health. According to CEO Alex Frommeyer, tooth decay is the most common infectious disease for children in the U.S. Through a sensor, the Beam Brush collects dental data and displays it in an application, so kids and parents can stay on top of their oral hygiene and even be rewarded for achieving their “brushing goals.” The company has also partnered with major dental insurance provider Delta Dental to use this data to reduce the risks and costs of oral disease. Since Christmas, over 2,000 brushes have been sold, and Beam has dreams for connected plates, bathmats, and more.

CliniCast unlocks the potential of health data to maximize outcomes and minimize costs. Founder Jack Challis seeks to provide a FICO score to health care data to make sure that physicians are delivering the best care and outcomes at a reasonable price. The system has tools to assess risk, streamline workflow, measure performance, and exchange information, to measure the effectiveness of each interaction. The goal is to improve the transparency of information in the marketplace and make health care as efficient as possible.

Zipongo provides healthy food incentives and personalized meal plans that engage employees, making it easier to eat well. “Food is medicine,” said CEO Dr. Jason Langheier. “We have built a ‘grocery Rx’ to deliver descriptions for health living.” Employers and health plans pay a small member fee a month, and Zipongo provides deals on food items, insights into dietary patterns, and suggestions for how to buy and eat healthier, and even recipes. The company has relationships with major grocery chains across the US and can be active in every zip code. started

Kit Check‘s product reduces the time it takes hospitals to process medication kits from 20 minutes to 20 seconds. Founder Kevin MacDonald is an RFID expert. He said that every year, billions of medications flow through hospitals and pharmacies, but there is a tremendous amount of waste and medical errors associated with the mismanagement of these supplies. Kit Check has built a box that can “kit” and quickly figure out what is missing and what is expired as well as generating all the required regulatory paperwork. The business charges per tag and has multiple six-figure revenue clients.

Greenwood Village, Co.-based Recondo Technology provides all kinds of software and services, including payments, insurance verification, and revenue recovery, to more than 450 U.S. hospitals. During its fiscal year 2012, the company claimed to increase revenue by 94 percent.

“This investment will be used to significantly expand our sales and marketing efforts, take client service to a new level, and broaden our product offerings through internal development and strategic merger and acquisition (M&A) opportunities,” Recondo CEO Rick Adam said in a statement.

Phil Yates, a founding partner of Bregal Sagemount, and Pavan Tripathi, a senior associate, will join the Recondo’s board of directors.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/24/recondo/feed/0609768Health care software biz Recondo Technology grabs $20M from Bregal SagemountA cure for cancer? This ‘big data’ startup says it can deliverhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/01/16/ayasdi/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/16/ayasdi/#respondWed, 16 Jan 2013 23:13:08 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=605740Ayasdi is working with the nation's top hospitals and medical researchers to uncover more targeted treatments for disease.
]]>‘Big data’ is one of the most over-used buzzwords in the startup vernacular, and founders rarely have the goods to back it up. So you’ll understand that I was intrigued — but highly skeptical — when an email with the subject line “using data to cure cancer” popped into my inbox.

But Ayasdi, a startup that closed $10 million in venture funding today, doesn’t just talk the talk. Stanford researchers have been baking the complex algorithms behind Ayasdi (its quirky name means “to seek,” in Cherokee) for over a decade, with the goal of unlocking the hidden value in human genetic data.

In 2008, the founders, Gurjeet Singh, Dr. Gunnar Carlsson, and Harlan Sexton, decided to commercialize the technology. With the government stepping up its funding for science, they were able to pull in $3.5 million in grants from DARPA, the department of defense agency responsible for building new technology for the military, and the National Science Foundation. The result? A synthesis of machine learning technology and topological data analysis (TDA) that has impressed a score of Silicon Valley investors. Rather than typing in search-style queries, the tools allow for automated discovery of information.

As Dr. Carlsson explained in an interview, “The idea is to answer questions that you didn’t know to ask.”

Eric Schadt, Director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, has a team of researchers using the technology to identify the genetic predispositions of many diseases, including cancer, which they hope will help them “glean new insights that will lead to breakthrough drug therapies.”

Ayasdi is working with the nation’s top hospitals and medical researchers to uncover more targeted treatments for disease. Singh, the company’s CEO, told me that hospitals and big pharmas are routinely pulling data from public sources — medical researchers are required to publish their data — and combine it with private data to yield new insights.

Above: A data visualization depicting 14 variants of breast cancer

The data isn’t anything new — it’s the technology that has evolved. “We have automated the discovery of knowledge from data,” said Singh in a phone interview. “We were able to discover a new type of breast cancer without asking questions.”

Singh was referring to a recent breakthrough where Ayasdi mapped 14 variants of breast cancer. Using data collected during a 15 year period, and studied by thousands of scientists, the algorithms discovered a sub-group of patients that have a higher chance of survival based on their genetic profile. If a patient falls into this sub-group, it is unlikely that they will require chemotherapy.

Ocko witnessed this medical breakthrough first-hand in the minutes before he opened his check book. “The massive deficit that corporations and governments face as the amount of data gets exponentially larger is not more intelligence, it’s insights and intuition,” he explained by phone. The data-focused investor said the company’s ability to provide human analysts with “intuition from vast amounts of data in very short periods of time” is virtually unprecedented.

In another recent partnership, with Mount Sinai Medical Center, Ayasdi was used to point to targeted treatment options for E. coli sufferers. E. coli affects more than 265,000 people in the U.S. every year, and millions around the world. It is known in the medical community for developing resistance to many drugs, and doctors are never 100 percent sure if a treatment will work or not. Mount Sinai is using Ayasdi to analyze the entire E. coli genome sequence, which includes more than 1 million DNA variants. This will further our understanding of why some types of E. coli develop resistance to antibiotics and how we can combat the spread of the bacteria.

Singh, a former researcher at Stanford, told me that the company has secured 20 customers in the oil and gas, government, pharmaceutical, and healthcare sectors. Big name customers include Merck, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/16/ayasdi/feed/0605740A cure for cancer? This ‘big data’ startup says it can deliverWith its data warehouse for hospitals, Health Catalyst pulls in $33Mhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/01/10/with-its-data-warehouse-for-hospitals-healthcatalyst-pulls-in-33m/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/10/with-its-data-warehouse-for-hospitals-healthcatalyst-pulls-in-33m/#respondThu, 10 Jan 2013 20:11:38 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=602312HealthCatalyst is the latest health technology startup to benefit from the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, which mandates that health providers and hospitals shift to to electronic records.
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HealthCatalyst is the latest health technology startup to benefit from the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

The startup, once known as Healthcare Quality Catalyst, provides health care data warehousing for 81 hospitals and health systems, serving 20 million patients. The company claims to be the only data warehouse that is specifically built for the healthcare industry.

This makes it ideally positioned to take advantage of Obamacare, which mandates that health providers and hospitals shift to to electronic records.

“Almost every hospital and hospital system will need a data warehouse to organize, visualize and utilize its data to address the $750 billion of waste in the U.S. healthcare system,” said Norwest Venture Partners’ Pramod Haque in a statement. He said that Health Catalyst can meet this need and boasts a “pipeline of health systems that are demanding the company’s solutions.” Its current customers include Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Texas Children’s Hospital.

The Salt Lake City-based company raised a mammoth $33 million in funding from a roster of venture capital firms. The second round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Sorenson Capital. Haque will join the board of directors, and Frank Bullock, Sorenson Capital’s managing director, will assume a role as a board adviser.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/10/with-its-data-warehouse-for-hospitals-healthcatalyst-pulls-in-33m/feed/0602312With its data warehouse for hospitals, Health Catalyst pulls in $33MAthenaHealth scoops up Epocrates to bring a mobile toolset to doctorshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/01/08/athenahealth-scoops-up-epocrates-to-bring-a-mobile-toolset-to-doctors/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/08/athenahealth-scoops-up-epocrates-to-bring-a-mobile-toolset-to-doctors/#respondTue, 08 Jan 2013 21:28:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=601057Epocrates Inc., a medical applications company based in Silicon Valley, is being scooped up by AthenaHealth for $293 million.
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Med-tech is off to a bold start this year with a hot acquisition, which will serve to consolidate the market.

Massachusetts-based AthenaHealth provides cloud-based services and tools to doctors and hospitals. The company faces fierce competition from Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Quality Systems, as well as Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, which is retooling after a protracted drama with its board.

Epocrates is an attractive prospect for AthenaHealth, as it has built up brand-name recognition with doctors. AthenaHealth estimates that it is has been used by 338,000 U.S. physicians to pull up short summaries on drugs, including information about side effects and interactions.

“Capturing mindshare has been an uphill battle for Athena for years, and the addition of Epocrates to the platform is a step in the right direction,” said Greg Bolan, an analyst with Sterne Agee & Leach Inc, in an e-mail interview with Bloomberg.

The acquisition will help the company gain an iPhone app and expand into the lucrative electronic medical records (EMR) market.

“I have been an admirer of Epocrates since it first emerged and have watched the company grow consistently, one app download at a time, as it has cemented itself into the consciousness of America’s physicians,” said Jonathan Bush, the president and CEO of AthenaHealth in a statement. “Together, we’re excited by the opportunity to redefine the mobile toolset for care givers,” he added.

At CloudBeat, VentureBeat’s recent customer-focused cloud conference, I caught up with Sanjay Poonen, president and corporate officer at SAP, who specializes in technology and product innovation. That afternoon, Poonen was joined on stage by one of the company’s biggest healthcare customers McKesson to discuss ongoing concerns about the cloud and their reasons for selecting SAP.

In this ensuing discussion, Poonen revealed that SAP has hedged its bets on its own big data solution, known as HANA. He told me that IT will be “transformed” by big data. In 2013, he said, “a lot of the hype goes out [the door] and the substance starts to show up.”

Watch the video for more of SAP’s predictions on the big tech trends for the coming year.